Interview Model Packet Response

In the Society for Quantitative Inquiry in Psychology model packet, authors (and my professor!) Joshua Clegg and Frederick J. Wertz have gone into immense descriptions about the process of getting the most you can out of an interview, and how to conduct a discussion with a participant. To support these new rules, the passage gives a heavy concentration of the study of conscious, deeply emphasized as an optimal approach. When interviewing your subjects, you must concentrate on the process of consciousness, and the subject’s direct experience. In short, you must be “reading” the person, all while you interview them and listen carefully to your responses, because this way, you will be able to further prompt the conversation and better expend the results. The professors interviewed two African-American males, who were around the same age. They asked them about their experiences with schizophrenia and living in their communities with aftercare, and then proceeded to ask the students to locate differentiations, resemblances, and subjects that the two might share. Finally, the reader was asked to come to their own conclusions and create their own findings based on higher knowledge, and on what they had observed.

I was, in turn, surprised by exactly how involved in the project and in the results I would be. I knew that I had conducted interviews for the Hurricane Sandy project and a few other random works here and there, but I knew that I wanted to get good at interviewing people, because I was going to start working for a harm reduction company in June. It was important for me to learn how to properly interview, because soon I would be doing nothing but interviewing. I loved how there were little moments as I had worked my way through the readings that I could recognize – I had once learned that the best way to conduct an interview was to nod politely and stare at the person you interviewed (not in a creepy way), as though you were expecting them to say more. The person in turn feels a little uncomfortable and divulges more than they originally would have, giving you a better response – one that is more natural and less predetermined.